Walmart acquires ShoeBuy for $70 million. Walmart has acquired ShoeBuy for $70 million to increase inventory on Jet.com and boost online sales growth. Offering more than a million products from over 800 brands, ShoeBuy sells shoes, clothing, and accessories.

Pingup delivers real-time appointment booking to millions of consumers. Pingup, a local-services transaction platform, has announced an integration with Bing, expanding Pingup’s reach to nearly 40 percent of search activity in the U.S. As a result, consumers will be able to easily search on Bing for local businesses and take action immediately to book appointments, schedule services, and place online orders.

Pingup.

Whirlpool and Amazon team up to deliver next generation voice-controlled appliances. Whirlpool Corporation announced a new collaboration with Amazon on a suite of voice-controlled home appliances. In early 2017, new smart appliances launching across the Whirlpool’s portfolio of brands will feature voice control capabilities through Alexa-enabled devices. “Now any customer with a far-field Alexa-enabled device can control most smart appliances made by Whirlpool Corporation, simply using their voice,” said Rob Pulciani, director, Amazon Alexa.

Thinkwrap Commerce launches FLASH Commerce Accelerator. Thinkwrap Commerce today announced that it has launched a new commerce accelerator based on the SAP Hybris Commerce solution. Thinkwrap FLASH (an acronym for Full Lifecycle Accelerator with Service and Hosting) is designed for B2B and B2C brands that want to go to market faster and with lower costs than a fully customized enterprise implementation. Contact for pricing.

World First USA, Inc. partners with Shop.com to open global markets for ecommerce. World First, a player in the international payments space, and Shop.com, a virtual marketplace that sells over 50 million products in over 200 countries, have joined forces to make it easier for ecommerce retailers to sell to overseas customers. Merchants can now sell their wares in the international marketplace, working with World First to open a receiving account in the country in which they are conducting business. This process allows sellers to easily transfer funds back to their domestic currency.

TripAdvisor expands subscription business into restaurants. TripAdvisor has announced additions to its subscription products, enabling accommodations and restaurants to attract, engage, and influence customers. These new products allow subscribers to access tools to help them capitalize on all the ways TripAdvisor drives value for their business. Features of the premium products include favorite reviews and photos, exclusive data and insights, enhanced analytics suite, live customer support, storyboard, and more.

TripAdvisor.

NovoPayment launches bot-enablement services for Messenger. NovoPayment, a payments provider, has announced the availability of Facebook Messenger integration with its platform. The new Messenger bot capabilities will allow end users of NovPayment’s clients to perform automated functions, such as opening accounts, checking balances and transaction histories, making peer-to-peer payments, watching tutorial videos, and having common help questions answered — all within the user-friendly Facebook Messenger app.

Rubikloud releases Customer LifeCycle Manager and Promotion Manager to drive revenue for large retailers. Rubikloud, a machine intelligence platform for enterprise retailers, has launched Customer LifeCycle Manager and Promotion Manager, as part of its suite of cloud-based decision management tools. Rubikloud’s machine learning library powers Customer LifeCycle Manager to predict and plan for customer behavior before it happens. By forecasting outcomes of promotional decisions before going to market, Rubikloud’s Promotion Manager saves retailers time and money. Both tools are rooted in machine learning performed at scale and have been deployed against production datasets measured in hundreds of terabytes.

Moz Local adds powerful Google My Business Insights Data to local search optimization platform. Moz, the search-engine-optimization platform that helps businesses raise their visibility with customers online and drive conversions offline, has announced the availability of Google My Business Insights data in Moz Local. Marketers can access how often customers are using direct searches or other queries to find them, whether they used Search or Maps, what action they took next (visited website, requested directions, called. or viewed photos) and more within Moz Local’s reporting platform. Google My Business Insights, paired with Moz Local’s active location data management system, provides enterprises and agencies with a tool to ensure that their online listings are seen by the greatest number of consumers.